H1N1 & Pregnancy

Millions of women in the Northern hemisphere might raise similar questions. I am tempted to say that the best advisers would be women your age who live in the Southern hemisphere. They are now at the end of what is usually the flu season. Many of them had a baby recently. I am sure that most of them would tell you that they heard about the so-called swine flu via the media but that they don’t know personally of any woman who had serious problems during pregnancy in relation to the flu. In other words they would advise you to live in peace. As long as serious cases are reported in the newspapers we can conclude that they are exceptionally rare.

Nobody can answer your question about ‘the lesser of two evils’. Usually, in medicine, the ratio of benefits to risks of a new treatment is evaluated through a ‘randomised controlled trial’. This means that the researchers study a population. The first step is to draw lots (i.e. to randomise) in order to establish two groups. One of the groups is given the new treatment. The other group is the control group. Then the follow-up period is as long as possible. The vaccine you’ll be offered has not been evaluated via this golden method. This is why the answer to your question should be: ‘We don’t know…and we can explain why we don’t know’.

Finally you might let your baby decide when he/she wants to enter this world.